


Forward/Back

by lalalalalawhy



Category: Original Work
Genre: Drabble, Drabble Sequence, F/F, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-05
Updated: 2017-07-05
Packaged: 2018-11-28 07:50:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11413461
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalalalalawhy/pseuds/lalalalalawhy
Summary: I skip through time like a flat stone on a still lake, spending days here, a few hours there, always moving forward. My love is the same, but reverse. Her lake is a mirror of mine. She only ever goes back.A love story in five drabbles.





	Forward/Back

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kisuru](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kisuru/gifts).



We first meet in Tenochtitlan in 1933. I say in truth “first,” but… well. Here she is, _que bonita_ , as the sun crests over the pyramid, a single white bloom tucked behind an ear. She smiles at me and it is all I see. I smile too, shy.

“Do I know you?” I ask, dazzled by her beauty.

“Not yet.”

She kisses me, and my lips part to hers. She pulls back, blinking away a tear.

“When will I see you again?”

“Soon,” she says. The sun shines down now, fully embracing us in light. “And never again.”

I’m gone.

* * *

I don’t know why I have this gift, this curse. I skip through time like a flat stone on a still lake, spending days here, a few hours there, always moving forward. Like the stone I cannot choose where I land.

My love is the same, but reverse. Her lake is a mirror of mine. She only ever goes back.

Sometimes we land in the same place. Sometimes we are allowed to stay. We hail a cab in New York, listen to swing music on the radio. I am delighted, and she smiles at me.

It is never long enough.

* * *

It’s China, 1936, and we finally have a moment to talk. She was right to be forward, to kiss me immediately, I tell her. She apologizes for something she has not yet done while we hold hands under the wishing trees in Lam Tsuen.

We tie wishes to oranges and toss them to the trees. I tell her to kiss me in 1933: inappropriate for strangers is an appropriate farewell. And hello.

It would also be a kiss good morning; I remember the sun rising against the pyramids. I do not tell her this. It will be a good surprise.

* * *

We are lovers, oh yes. We make love in the moonlight in the West Maui Mountains in 1954, on a Kyoto rooftop in 1962, a New Delhi hotel in 1971. Not everywhere is romantic: we fuck on the dirty floor of a West Berlin nightclub in 1986, and, on our next/prior jump, in a dark, leaky stairwell in East Berlin.

We are also fighters, reluctantly, more often than we’d like. Normandy 1944, Kosovo 1998. Stonewall, 1969. I threw a brick, but I left before it hit.

I should have spent more time kissing. But the bricks may count more.

* * *

It is 2025 and the sun sets over the wind turbines just visible on Cape Town’s horizon.

It is not my first time meeting my wife, but it is her first time meeting me. I am shyer than she is, just as I knew I would be. I do not kiss her right away. We sit together, watching the red-toned sunset.

We had/will have/will have had so much time, but there is so much we did not/would not.

What a waste: we only ever have the present. And our presence.

Until I do not. She is gone.


End file.
